#cmdr_nova

But!

I’m finally NORMAL AGAIN!

This album follows themes that revolve around ideas about where my music has been going for the past decade, and also some liminality, and most especially, the Backrooms, including some select sampling from the Kane Pixels Youtube series.

I’ve always had this headcanon that my music is an endless story of someone being so lost in the vastness of space, that time, relativity, and reality itself has warped in and onto itself. What fits better in a warped, terrifying void, than an endless labyrinth you can never escape? To me, the Backrooms, and space, may as well be the same thing.

But that’s all I really have to say about all of this for now. The album is set to release on October 31st, 2025, and with four more tracks left to flesh out, I feel like I can hit this release date, no problem.

You can pre-order it, here.

Source: Original Post

And then December 2025 happened. Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS dropped with COSMIC Epoch 1 as the “stable” release.

Seven months later, and I’m just… disappointed.

Not rage-quit disappointed. Not “I’m switching to Bazzite tomorrow” disappointed (though the thought has crossed my mind more than once). Just the quiet, grinding kind of disappointment that builds up every time something basic fails in a way that feels like it should have been solved months ago.

Let’s start with the simple stuff.

Alt+Tab is a coin flip.

I press Alt+Tab expecting the last window I was in. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it picks something completely random. Sometimes it decides the terminal I have open must stay on top of the stack no matter what I do, so every time I try to switch away and back it just… stays there. Unpredictable window switching in 2026 on a desktop environment that’s supposed to be the future. Cool.

The COSMIC Store updater is a resource vampire.

I’ll be minding my own business and suddenly the entire system starts lagging. Fans spin up. Everything feels heavy. I open the system monitor and there it is — the store updater chewing through CPU like it’s trying to mine crypto in the background. On a machine with 64 gigs of RAM and 11 processor cores. This isn’t a low-end laptop. This shouldn’t happen.

Two-second lag on open.

COSMIC Store. COSMIC Files. Both of them. Click the icon… wait… wait… there it is. Every single time. On hardware that should make these apps feel instant. It’s not a one-off hitch. It’s consistent. It’s annoying. And it makes the whole desktop feel slower than it has any right to be.

File copying is broken.

I cannot reliably copy files from one directory to another in COSMIC Files. It just fails. Sometimes silently. Sometimes with a vague error. I’ve taken to just opening a terminal and using cp or rsync because I got tired of the GUI lying to me. That’s not a great look for a desktop environment that ships its own file manager as a core app.

Wayland has been a seven-month nightmare for gaming.

I knew the jump to Wayland was going to be rough. I did not expect it to still feel this bad almost seven months after the “stable” release. Gaming on Pop!_OS right now ranges from “frustrating” to “literally impossible if you don’t already know what knobs to twist.” Proton + Wayland + COSMIC still has sharp edges everywhere. If you’re not deep in the GitHub issues and Discord troubleshooting threads, good luck. And even if you are, half the time the solution is “just wait for the next update.”

Screenshot tool is unreliable.

I’ll set it to save the file. It’ll decide to only put it on the clipboard instead. Or it’ll do both. Or it’ll do neither and just… vanish. The snip feature feels like it was implemented by someone who doesn’t actually take screenshots for a living. Which is wild, because I take a lot of screenshots.

Keyboard dies after sleep.

Wake the PC from sleep and my keyboard just… doesn’t work. Have to unplug it and plug it back in, or reboot. Every single time. This one feels especially insulting because sleep/wake is one of those things that should Just Work™ on a polished desktop.

I could keep going. There are more. Little papercuts that add up. Animations that hitch. Focus issues. The occasional full desktop freeze that requires a trip to a TTY. Stuff that makes daily driving it feel like living in a perpetual beta, even though they called it stable back in December.

And here’s the part that really stings:

Despite how unfinished 24.04 still feels, System76 is already moving on to the next LTS.

They’re already looking at 26.04. The foundation isn’t even solid yet and the roadmap has already shifted focus toward the next big version. I get it — development doesn’t stop. You can’t freeze everything just because the current release has issues. But when the current “stable” LTS still has basic window management, file operations, sleep/wake, and gaming in this state after seven months, it starts to feel like the users who actually live on this desktop every day are being left to deal with the rough edges while the company chases the next shiny milestone.

I wanted COSMIC to be the one. I really did. A desktop environment built by people who actually ship Linux hardware, written in Rust, free from the GNOME politics, with real ownership over the full stack. That vision is still exciting.

But right now? It just feels half-baked. And the longer the rough edges stick around while the next LTS looms on the horizon, the harder it gets to stay optimistic.

I’m not leaving yet. I’m stubborn, and I’ve got years invested in this setup. But the disappointment is real. And it’s starting to stack higher than my terminal windows.

Source: Original Post

From the day I registered and got my invite-code, when I asked someone to give warning before addressing her followers with a slur, and getting dogpiled for it, to sharing my personal experiences and issues with no one in-particular, and mostly trying to explain to people that my experiences aren’t exactly the same as everyone else’s, and getting dogpiled for it. To now, watching someone share donation requests with the network around Bluesky, by framing it around threats against their own life if strangers don’t donate, and me addressing that and saying, like, “Hey, this is bad. You should not do this. You absolutely shouldn’t pin the potential end of your life on other people just because they haven’t sent you money.” And getting dogpiled for it.

I’m done. I’ve had enough.

The ideological differences between extreme left purity police on Bluesky, and extreme right conservatives on Twitter (X) are different, but their behavioral patterns and the way they treat people are exactly the same. Like sociopaths: glib, lacking in concern or empathy for others, and a measure of self importance so great that it doesn’t matter who they harm, as long as it benefits themselves.

Is it the way algorithms have worked for the past decade and a half that has made people this way? Or have a lot of people just always been susceptible to being downright pieces of shit?

I don’t know at this point, and I don’t care. What I do know is that none of these people see themselves as evil, or bad, and there is no way to convince them that they are.

I once joined Bluesky because the Fediverse felt lacking in community, because all the people I’d regularly communicate with (if we got along) decided to join bsky, because choosing a server on the Fediverse is just too hard (apparently). But there’s no such thing as community. There is only every person out for themselves at the cost of everyone around them.

And I think I’ve finally decided that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter where you go or where you post, because disgusting people are everywhere. It’s just that there’s a much higher concentration of them on certain apps, like Bluesky. And that’s not to say I haven’t had run-ins with extra extremely mega shitty people on the Fediverse as-of-late: I have. But at least on Mastodon or what-have-you, I have complete control to silence anyone who even so much as clicks on my profile wrong, through my entire server.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Why is social media even that important, anyway?”

I don’t know. I spent a lot of time on social media when I was out of work, when I didn’t really have an income, when I needed support from those who were digitally around me, and it became a thing that’s attached to me like an extra appendage, and ever since the “net split” and exodus from Twitter (X) it’s been a nonstop circulation of, “Where can I go to find what I used to have, community, support, friends, where I wont be cutting myself off from a large amount of people?”

But I just don’t care anymore.

Source: Original Post

And then December 2025 happened. Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS dropped with COSMIC Epoch 1 as the “stable” release.

Seven months later, and I’m just… disappointed.

Not rage-quit disappointed. Not “I’m switching to Bazzite tomorrow” disappointed (though the thought has crossed my mind more than once). Just the quiet, grinding kind of disappointment that builds up every time something basic fails in a way that feels like it should have been solved months ago.

Let’s start with the simple stuff.

Alt+Tab is a coin flip.

I press Alt+Tab expecting the last window I was in. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it picks something completely random. Sometimes it decides the terminal I have open must stay on top of the stack no matter what I do, so every time I try to switch away and back it just… stays there. Unpredictable window switching in 2026 on a desktop environment that’s supposed to be the future. Cool.

The COSMIC Store updater is a resource vampire.

I’ll be minding my own business and suddenly the entire system starts lagging. Fans spin up. Everything feels heavy. I open the system monitor and there it is — the store updater chewing through CPU like it’s trying to mine crypto in the background. On a machine with 64 gigs of RAM and 11 processor cores. This isn’t a low-end laptop. This shouldn’t happen.

Two-second lag on open.

COSMIC Store. COSMIC Files. Both of them. Click the icon… wait… wait… there it is. Every single time. On hardware that should make these apps feel instant. It’s not a one-off hitch. It’s consistent. It’s annoying. And it makes the whole desktop feel slower than it has any right to be.

File copying is broken.

I cannot reliably copy files from one directory to another in COSMIC Files. It just fails. Sometimes silently. Sometimes with a vague error. I’ve taken to just opening a terminal and using cp or rsync because I got tired of the GUI lying to me. That’s not a great look for a desktop environment that ships its own file manager as a core app.

Wayland has been a seven-month nightmare for gaming.

I knew the jump to Wayland was going to be rough. I did not expect it to still feel this bad almost seven months after the “stable” release. Gaming on Pop!_OS right now ranges from “frustrating” to “literally impossible if you don’t already know what knobs to twist.” Proton + Wayland + COSMIC still has sharp edges everywhere. If you’re not deep in the GitHub issues and Discord troubleshooting threads, good luck. And even if you are, half the time the solution is “just wait for the next update.”

Screenshot tool is unreliable.

I’ll set it to save the file. It’ll decide to only put it on the clipboard instead. Or it’ll do both. Or it’ll do neither and just… vanish. The snip feature feels like it was implemented by someone who doesn’t actually take screenshots for a living. Which is wild, because I take a lot of screenshots.

Keyboard dies after sleep.

Wake the PC from sleep and my keyboard just… doesn’t work. Have to unplug it and plug it back in, or reboot. Every single time. This one feels especially insulting because sleep/wake is one of those things that should Just Work™ on a polished desktop.

I could keep going. There are more. Little papercuts that add up. Animations that hitch. Focus issues. The occasional full desktop freeze that requires a trip to a TTY. Stuff that makes daily driving it feel like living in a perpetual beta, even though they called it stable back in December.

And here’s the part that really stings:

Despite how unfinished 24.04 still feels, System76 is already moving on to the next LTS.

They’re already looking at 26.04. The foundation isn’t even solid yet and the roadmap has already shifted focus toward the next big version. I get it — development doesn’t stop. You can’t freeze everything just because the current release has issues. But when the current “stable” LTS still has basic window management, file operations, sleep/wake, and gaming in this state after seven months, it starts to feel like the users who actually live on this desktop every day are being left to deal with the rough edges while the company chases the next shiny milestone.

I wanted COSMIC to be the one. I really did. A desktop environment built by people who actually ship Linux hardware, written in Rust, free from the GNOME politics, with real ownership over the full stack. That vision is still exciting.

But right now? It just feels half-baked. And the longer the rough edges stick around while the next LTS looms on the horizon, the harder it gets to stay optimistic.

I’m not leaving yet. I’m stubborn, and I’ve got years invested in this setup. But the disappointment is real. And it’s starting to stack higher than my terminal windows.

Source: Original Post

From the day I registered and got my invite-code, when I asked someone to give warning before addressing her followers with a slur, and getting dogpiled for it, to sharing my personal experiences and issues with no one in-particular, and mostly trying to explain to people that my experiences aren’t exactly the same as everyone else’s, and getting dogpiled for it. To now, watching someone share donation requests with the network around Bluesky, by framing it around threats against their own life if strangers don’t donate, and me addressing that and saying, like, “Hey, this is bad. You should not do this. You absolutely shouldn’t pin the potential end of your life on other people just because they haven’t sent you money.” And getting dogpiled for it.

I’m done. I’ve had enough.

The ideological differences between extreme left purity police on Bluesky, and extreme right conservatives on Twitter (X) are different, but their behavioral patterns and the way they treat people are exactly the same. Like sociopaths: glib, lacking in concern or empathy for others, and a measure of self importance so great that it doesn’t matter who they harm, as long as it benefits themselves.

Is it the way algorithms have worked for the past decade and a half that has made people this way? Or have a lot of people just always been susceptible to being downright pieces of shit?

I don’t know at this point, and I don’t care. What I do know is that none of these people see themselves as evil, or bad, and there is no way to convince them that they are.

I once joined Bluesky because the Fediverse felt lacking in community, because all the people I’d regularly communicate with (if we got along) decided to join bsky, because choosing a server on the Fediverse is just too hard (apparently). But there’s no such thing as community. There is only every person out for themselves at the cost of everyone around them.

And I think I’ve finally decided that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter where you go or where you post, because disgusting people are everywhere. It’s just that there’s a much higher concentration of them on certain apps, like Bluesky. And that’s not to say I haven’t had run-ins with extra extremely mega shitty people on the Fediverse as-of-late: I have. But at least on Mastodon or what-have-you, I have complete control to silence anyone who even so much as clicks on my profile wrong, through my entire server.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Why is social media even that important, anyway?”

I don’t know. I spent a lot of time on social media when I was out of work, when I didn’t really have an income, when I needed support from those who were digitally around me, and it became a thing that’s attached to me like an extra appendage, and ever since the “net split” and exodus from Twitter (X) it’s been a nonstop circulation of, “Where can I go to find what I used to have, community, support, friends, where I wont be cutting myself off from a large amount of people?”

But I just don’t care anymore.

Source: Original Post

That said, let’s be real about the nuances. Gacha mechanics are basically gambling dressed up in shiny anime art and hype music. The rush of a good pull can hook you hard, and yeah, some games make it way too easy to drop real money chasing meta units. But it doesn’t have to be a problem. If you go in with discipline—setting a monthly budget (or zero-spend rule), treating pulls as a bonus instead of the goal, and walking away when it stops being fun—you can enjoy them guilt-free. If you know you’ve got gambling tendencies, though, just skip ‘em entirely. No shame. Life’s too short to stress over pixels.

If you’re looking to dip your toes in without getting overwhelmed, here’s my shortlist of solid starting points right now (which you’ve definitely seen me write about here on my site before):

Arknights: Endfield – My top pick of the bunch. It’s a spin-off from the tower defense hit Arknights, but this one shifts into a more open survival/base-building action RPG vibe set in a harsh, post-catastrophe world. The theme leans heavy on exploration, resource management, and that eerie, high-stakes atmosphere. What really sells it for me are the strong Kojima influences—think Death Stranding-style traversal, weighty storytelling, and weird futuristic tension. It feels ambitious and different from the usual gacha formula, and I’m hyped to see how it plays out.

Wuthering Waves – A story-rich open-world action RPG where you play as the Rover, waking up in a world wrecked by the Lament. It’s got fluid combat, echo collection (basically monster powers you equip), and a vibrant cast of Resonators. The theme mixes post-apocalyptic survival with high-mobility exploration and emotional character stories. Great if you want something that feels expansive and rewarding to roam around in—plus the music and combat slap.

Zenless Zone Zero – From the HoYoverse folks, this one drops you into New Eridu, the last safe city in a post-apocalyptic world full of mysterious Hollows (dangerous alternate dimensions). You act as a Proxy guiding people through them while running a video store front. The theme is slick urban cyberpunk with retro-analog aesthetics, over-the-top stylish action, and a ton of personality in the characters and Bangboo companions. Combat is fast and flashy, and the TV-style mission navigation is a fun twist.

All three scratch that anime gacha itch in their own way, and they’re generous enough with free pulls that you can make solid progress without opening your wallet. Start with whichever theme clicks most—Endfield for that Kojima weirdness, Wuthering Waves for big-world freedom, or ZZZ for city vibes and style. Honestly, you can’t really go wrong in any of these three and I personally wouldn’t bother touching any other game (Genshin Impact has far too much content for new players right now, Honkai: Star Rail has no expanded platform compatibility except for on the Epic launcher and your phone, which sucks if you aren’t a Windows user, and most everything else is just okay).

You might be wondering, “How come you didn’t include Neverness to Everness in your list?”

Personally, while NTE is obviously pretty cool, my experience with it thus far has been one of experiencing jank, and sloppy UI development, which breaks the experience for me.

But anyway, that’s the quick starter pack. Gacha games aren’t for everyone, but they can be a blast when you approach them on your terms. Dive in, experiment, and have fun out there. Good luck!

Source: Original Post

This would begin some of the most agonizing days ever.

When the wind stopped, we could all see outside that entire trees had fallen, plants had been ripped out of the ground, large branches flew into windshields, power lines laid bent and split literally all over the place, and nobody had electricity.

In the middle of a heatwave.

At temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more, and 90+ percent humidity.

I expected that power would probably be restored while I was at work.

I was extremely wrong.

It is currently July 7th, as I write this, and I am chugging away on battery power and battery power only, because nobody up or down my entire street has power, and most of them are running generators on 40 dollars a day USD. I am not one of those people.

The electric company says power may be restored tonight, or sometime later tomorrow night. None of my clothing is clean, I’ve been sleeping on and off, I’ve had mostly snack food to eat with sporadic Doordash deliveries in-between, and I managed to snag a single night in a hotel for some real sleep and normal activities I usually partake in, before the entire surrounding county booked out the rest of the hotels in the area, including the room I was staying in, for days and days after.

My job expects that I’ll be in sometime tonight to help prepare for the inventory counting that’s coming up in a few days, but the only thing I honestly care about right now is being able to breathe air without the detriment of choking wet heat.

This post itself likely won’t be published until after the electricity is back on, and I can only imagine what that’ll be like. I’m having dreams about my a/c suddenly turning back on.

I usually have dreams about much stranger things than this.

Source: Original Post

This would begin some of the most agonizing days ever.

When the wind stopped, we could all see outside that entire trees had fallen, plants had been ripped out of the ground, large branches flew into windshields, power lines laid bent and split literally all over the place, and nobody had electricity.

In the middle of a heatwave.

At temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more, and 90+ percent humidity.

I expected that power would probably be restored while I was at work.

I was extremely wrong.

It is currently July 7th, as I write this, and I am chugging away on battery power and battery power only, because nobody up or down my entire street has power, and most of them are running generators on 40 dollars a day USD. I am not one of those people.

The electric company says power may be restored tonight, or sometime later tomorrow night. None of my clothing is clean, I’ve been sleeping on and off, I’ve had mostly snack food to eat with sporadic Doordash deliveries in-between, and I managed to snag a single night in a hotel for some real sleep and normal activities I usually partake in, before the entire surrounding county booked out the rest of the hotels in the area, including the room I was staying in, for days and days after.

My job expects that I’ll be in sometime tonight to help prepare for the inventory counting that’s coming up in a few days, but the only thing I honestly care about right now is being able to breathe air without the detriment of choking wet heat.

This post itself likely won’t be published until after the electricity is back on, and I can only imagine what that’ll be like. I’m having dreams about my a/c suddenly turning back on.

I usually have dreams about much stranger things than this.

Source: Original Post